


Be Your Planet

by Skylark



Category: Pocket Monsters: X & Y | Pokemon X & Y Versions
Genre: Established Relationship, Late Night Conversations, Late at Night, M/M, Massage, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 03:46:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17113859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skylark/pseuds/Skylark
Summary: It's well past midnight—a glance at the wall clock says it's 3:00 AM, but Augustine isn't sure if it was adjusted for daylight savings or not. Neither of them are good at those kinds of mundane details.





	Be Your Planet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FriendlyHougen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FriendlyHougen/gifts).



> Title from "Back of the Car" by Miike Snow, which seems like a perfectworldshipping song to me.

Augustine has to pause by the study door for a moment, taking the sight in.

It's well past midnight, he knows that for sure. The wall clock says it's 3:00 AM, but Augustine isn't sure if it was adjusted for daylight savings or not; neither of them are good at those kinds of mundane details. The lights are off in the room, save for the desk lamp that floods the work area with bright fluorescent light. Augustine squints at the harsh brilliance of it, especially after the darkness of the rest of the house—he prefers softer incandescent bulbs himself, but he likes Lysandre keeping his eyesight more.

The man himself is seated in front of the desk, hunched over it as he focuses on his work. Knowing him, he's been like that for hours, patiently and endlessly soldering wires and adjusting connections and setting minuscule chips in place. 

The technology splashed across the desk sits at odds with the room's soft, Romantic furnishings—dark carved wood, soft velvet cushions. Lysandre comes from old money, and it gives him a weight, a sense of place, that Augustine finds alien yet comforting. Augustine smiles a little, watching him so comfortably ensconced in such a regal environment, and he pulls his gaze away, he can see the soft glow of a waning gibbous moon through the window. 

"But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?" he murmurs. "It is the east, and Lysandre is the sun."

"It doesn't scan as well as the original," comes the amused reply from the man hunched over the workbench, and Augustine straightens in surprise.

"I didn't mean to distract you—"

"Of course you did," Lysandre replies, his voice a low rumble. He straightens, but slowly, attempting to mask a wince as he straightens and his muscles protest the movement. Augustine's made that face himself dozens of times. "You came to save me from myself, didn't you?"

Augustine laughs, unfolding his arms and stepping further into the room. "I was going to keep working on my thesis, but on second thought," he gestures to the wall clock, still ticking forlornly in a shadowy corner of the room, "maybe we'd better stop for today. We'll have fresh eyes in the morning, after all."

"Hmm," Lysandre says, looking down at his workbench with reluctance. Sprawled across it is a strange contraption that Augustine doesn't recognize, three long metallic arms that snarl in strange loops across the desk. "It's not a good place to stop, but then again, it never is."

Lysandre comes with Augustine to the kitchen, still rolling his shoulders and moving his head back and forth to get the stiffness out. Augustine pours him a glass of water and pulls out a chair for him. 

"I've already been sitting for hours," Lysandre says. "Standing up feels nice."

"But you're too tall!" Augustine says with a laugh. "How will I give you a massage if you stand?"

That gets Lysandre to sit down, sighing gratefully as Augustine rubs his neck and shoulders. He rocks back and forth in the chair underneath Augustine's hands, managing to drink water despite the movement. "Your famous massages," he says, his rumbling tone as light-hearted as it is grateful.

Augustine laughs. "Of course. That's why the professor took me on as an aide, after all."

"Is that how he treats you?" Lysandre says. His voice is still slurred around the edges, late-night relaxed, but there's something sharp buried in his tone that makes Augustine pause. "A masseuse?"

"No. Well," he says with a short self-deprecating chuckle, "maybe at first. But not anymore. He hasn't asked me to fetch coffee in ages. I even have my own office now!"

"Lysandre Labs could use more hands, you know," comes the reply, but that odd tone has left his voice. Augustine relaxes, even though he didn't realize that he'd tensed, and continues his ministrations. He can feel the knots in Lysandre's shoulders unwinding as he works, and he feels cheered by it. "Pokemon technology is always in-demand, and it's lucrative besides. Just look at Silph Co. in Kanto, for example."

"Oh, but I love my job," Augustine says with regret; it's not the first time they've had some variation of this conversation. "One day I will be professor myself, and then all the coffee-carrying will have been worth it. And Silph Co.? Please, mon cherie. Surely you could do better than some stuffy old men staring at poké balls in a lab," Augustine says with a toss of his head.

"Isn't that what _you_ all do?" Lysandre points out. Augustine pauses, thinking about it, before bursting into laughter. 

"You're right!" he says. "You're right, though I think our fieldwork is probably more interesting."

"You hate fieldwork though," Lysandre says. Augustine laughs again.

"I do! I'm a city boy, I can't handle the country. Looking at landscapes, admiring a beautiful sunset, ah! That is happiness. But going out into the mud? Being bitten by insects? I would rather stay in my office and peer-read articles." Augustine's hands have stopped in order to lift into the air and move in grand gestures, intimating the beautiful sweep of the Kalos countryside. "Give me a good café and that's all I need."

"I'll keep that in mind," Lysandre says.

After a few moments, Augustine says "Oh!" and goes back to rubbing Lysandre's shoulders. Lysandre leans back slightly, pushing more of his weight into Augustine's hands.

"Is that what you were working on?" Lysandre asks. "Reading journals?"

"You know me so well," Augustine says fondly. "It's so important to stay on the cutting edge of pokémon research, but when I get started I just lose all track of time. It must be the same for your field, no?"

"I suppose," he says slowly.

"What about you? What were you doing in the study?" he asks, tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth as he rubs in slow firm circles.

"Well right now, it's just a prototype," he says. "It doesn't work at all yet. But hopefully, when I'm done it will provide pokémon trainers with a data readout that they can use when in battle."

"That sounds fascinating. How does it work?"

"It's the signal processing that's giving me the most trouble," he says. "The computer model didn't have this problem, but when I built it, the prototype..."

Augustine can't follow Lysandre when he goes into the technological weeds like this, and honestly he doesn't try. Instead he listens to the timbre of Lysandre's voice, the way it swings between frustration and determination as he talks about problems, failures, and potential solutions. 

He can't follow the topic, but he's well-versed in how to keep someone talking when he's not listening closely. He makes the right noises at the right times, focusing his attention instead on one difficult knot at the base of Lysandre's neck, smiling at the groan of relief Lysandre gives once he works it free. Fifteen minutes later, Lysandre's voice has evened out into a half-asleep mumble, and Augustine's hands are pleasantly sore.

Lysandre is brilliant and driven, and handsome besides; Augustine is lucky to have him, inasmuch as anyone could have someone who is such a brilliant and lonely star. Augustine's the only one who gets to see him with all his defenses lowered, his head rolling agreeably into Augustine's hand when he presses a hand against his cheek.

"Bed?" he suggests, and Lysandre nods, his eyes drooping closed. Augustine helps him get up and follows him up the stairs, both of them yawning.

Tomorrow's a new day, with more hard work for both of them, but it will be perfect, Augustine thinks, as long as Lysandre is there to share it with.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by the fact that Lysandre wears [this](https://cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/1/13/VSLysandre_2.png) when he fights the protagonist.


End file.
